Paranormal Activity 4 has a single, solitary scary scene that occurs early on, a quick jolt of a moment in which a character gets yanked off a bed, but not by whom you’d expect. Otherwise, this fourth entry in the lucrative indie-horror franchise positively reeks of tedium, utilizing the same old tired bag of franchise scare tactics and a needlessly convoluted storyline.
Where the first two sequels acted as prequels to the micro-budgeted original, in which a California couple (Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston) was terrorized by a demon, this one takes place some five years later, centering on a Nevada family that starts experiencing paranormal phenomena soon after a neighborhood boy comes to stay with them.
I respect the series in general for eschewing gore (and any kind of score) and instead relying on the suspense of silence to generate scares. Even here there’s no sound more pregnant with dread than that of a quiet house at night. And the found-footage format—at first, anyway—was a clever conceit on creator Oren Peli’s part and nicely adds to the realism of the supernatural situations.
But the novelty of seeing an invisible force open doors, turn on cars, move around chairs and levitate people, at least in the hands of directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, is gone. As is any sense of terror. At best I felt anxious. And Joost’s and Schulman’s attempt to freshen things up visually via laptop camera angles and Xbox Kinect tracking dots is only effective for so long.
And where the original played like a simple but really scary two-person play, each successive chapter has had to add backstory and characters and absurd plot elements to keep the storyline alive. So while we wait for this one to reveal its link to the original, we must endure the dull day-to-day of a pair of bickering parents, their teen daughter, her little brother and her horny teenage male friend.
Kathryn Newton actually does OK as the daughter. You can almost feel her frustration at how her parents (Alexondra Lee and late spouse Stephen Dunham) shrug off her claims of strange goings-on. But then they’re apparently so distracted by their marital woes that Lee never even questions why, at one point, Dunham is standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night holding a really big knife. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]
Horror
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 1/29/13
